Growing Number of Major U.S. Corporations Embracing Eastern Meditation Practices

A growing number of major American corporations are offering meditation, mindfulness and yoga programs for their employees, practices that are believed to have originated in pagan Eastern religions.

Last week, the California-based software company Salesforce generated media attention for putting meditation rooms on every floor of the company’s newest corporate office building in San Francisco.

Marc Benioff, who is Salesforce’s CEO and an outspoken proponent of homosexual marriage, said the meditation rooms facilitate “mindfulness.”

“There’s a ‘mindfulness’ zone where employees can put their phones into a basket or whatever, and go into an area where there’s quietness,” he stated, according to “Business Insider.” “I think this is really important to cultivating innovation in your company.”

Fifty miles southeast of Salesforce’s San Francisco office, Google offers a meditation course called “Search Inside Yourself” to workers in its Silicon Valley headquarters. More than a thousand Google employees have been through the mindfulness training course, which promotes Eastern meditation practices.

“It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions,” a report from “Wired.com” explained. “Across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts.”

Google’s meditation routines are designed to help employees “search for meaning and emotional connection.”

Google is one of many technological companies that has come to embrace meditation and mindfulness programs. Facebook, also headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley, provides a meditation room for employees and is actively seeking to infuse Buddhist values into its corporate culture.

“While many other Silicon Valley companies are teaching their employees to meditate, Facebook is trying to inject a Buddhist-inspired concept of compassion into the core of its business,” “Wired.com” reports.

Many other technological companies have begun promoting Buddhist-inspired meditation techniques. AOL Time Warner offers quiet rooms for employees to refresh and mentally refocus. Yahoo! encourages workers to take advantage of meditation rooms. And Apple reportedly allows employees to take 30 minutes each day to meditate at work.

Why are yoga and meditation so popular among corporate giants of the tech field? Some trace the trend back to the early pioneers of computers and the Internet.

“Many of the people who shaped the personal computer industry and the Internet were once members of the hippie counterculture,” wrote Noah Shachtman on “Wired.com.” “So an interest in Eastern faiths is all but hardwired into the modern tech world.”

This interest in Eastern faiths is not limited to California-based tech giants, however; many non-technological companies are also working meditation routines into their corporate schedules. According to recent articles from The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, General Mills, Target, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs Groups have all started offering mindfulness programs.

“Across the country there’s a loosening up of social mores right now and things like yoga and meditation just are not as foreign or as taboo as they once were,” said David Gelles, author of the book “Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from Inside the Out,” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Yoga has become extremely popular.”

As meditation, yoga and related practices grow more popular among American workplaces, a number of respected Christian leaders have voiced concerns over the practices’ ties to unbiblical Eastern religions. Dr. Albert Mohler of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary describes yoga as “a spiritual discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving consciousness of the divine.”

“There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the main issue,” Mohler wrote in a blog post titled “The Subtle Body—Should Christians Practice Yoga?” “But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose.”

“Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a ‘post-Christian, spiritually polyglot’ reality,” he concluded. “Should any Christian willingly risk that?”

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Paige Turner

If it helps people then its a good thing. Yoga is simply a series of stretches and meditation is quieting the mind. If it works then do it.

AMEN!
Can’t argue with THAT! You certainly got all of the important stuff right!
Anybody who knows and promotes that only true peace can be found in Jesus deserves an up vote. 😉

Quantz

YOGA is evil now?
What….what….
Just….WHAT?

The Last Trump

Ok. What?

Quantz

Of all the mundane things to attack, why (on earth) YOGA?

Gena B

I thought the ‘poses’ were actually a form of prayers. And not prayers to the God of the Bible.

Paige Turner

Thats a really intelligent and cogent argument. *shakes head in disbelief*

Yoga is stretching and meditation is quieting the mind. Religion has nothing to do with it and neither does Jesus.

Lexical Cannibal

Oh believe me, I’m right there with you; sometimes I wonder if people would start decrying calisthenics if a religion they didn’t like made a big enough deal about doing it. I just figured I could save our fellow commenters the time it would take to regurgitate it themselves.

Paige Turner

Got it now. Edited.

Quantz

I think Lexical is being sarcastic…he’s on our side.
Feel free however to laugh uproariously at Mr. L. Trump above…

Paige Turner

Edited to reflect.

April J

I agree. Many instructors will ask you to “set an intention” at the beginning of your practice. They aren’t trying to control your intentions, they want you to set your own. So you could spend your practice in prayer or focusing on hearing God’s voice. It’s all up to you what you get out of your practice.

Paige Turner

All that is right except the part about Gods voice.

Straight Shooter

This nonsense has been around for years, it’s that faux-Eastern spirituality that makes the “spiritual but not religious” types feel good about themselves.

Herb Planter

yup just business as usual

April J

Meditation doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to paganism. It can be helpful to sit and have quiet time to focus on our faith and relationship with God. Meditation can open our minds to really hear God’s voice.

http://www.bing.com/ Martin Smit

I looked deep inside myself, and see!
I found … me.
Hi me!
How are we?
All alonely.

Ivette Santiago

And there speaks the voice of COMPROMISE – apparently a most successful tool that the enemy has utilized way back in the garden…causing that oh so awful fall!

Mark Welte

You are a pinhead organization and the reported is an especial pinhead. David Gelles is a business writer at the New York Times, not a ‘yoga provider.’ Get your facts straight. Christianity demands it. Jesus wouldn’t publish flimsy stories.

Josey

Depends what you are meditating on and opening your mind up to, a lot of yoga is about shutting everything out and opening your mind up which the devil will gladly fill up with his junk.
Here’s a few scriptures on meditating: Psalms 1:2 – But his delight [is] in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. Psalms 19:14 – Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.
Psalms 119:15 – I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways.
Psalms 104:34 – My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the LORD.
Meditating on God’s word will quiet your heart, soul and it is filled up with God’s word and truths and it doesn’t leave the mind blank and open to the occult. That old serpent the devil always takes from God’s word and twists it for his own purposes, he is the father of lies.

acontraryview

So meditation is both Eastern and Western.

Ivette Santiago

It’s applicability are polar opposites. Whereby Eastern meditation would have you empty your minds to allow whatever demonic presence would gain to seek access, Scriptural meditation would have you to focus on the word of God – what is it that He’s saying to and how is it that He’s directing you to apply it…like I said polar opposites…

acontraryview

“Whereby Eastern meditation would have you empty your minds to allow whatever demonic presence would gain to seek access,”

Couldn’t God gain access as well?

How is it that you know what people are focusing on when they meditate?

Josey

I was referring to what God’s word says about meditating on His word and the blessing to the one who does these things. Not the mindless meditating of yoga which accomplishes nothingness.
Psalm 1:1-6 1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. 3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. 4 The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. 5 Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. 6 For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.

acontraryview

How is it that you are aware of what people are focusing on when they meditate?

Guest

Meditation is a natural physiological exercise technique where you are using the brain rather than muscles. Great book “How to Meditate” by Lawrence Le Shan. Nothing mystical about it, you pick a nonsense sound, sit, breath, repeat the sound and learn to keep your mind focused on the task at hand no matter the internal or external distraction. The more you do it the better you get until you can literally calm your mind at anytime, anywhere with just a moment of introspection.

Any repetitive mental activity is mediation, whether it be prayer, counting beads, or just saying ‘be bop’ to the exclusion of all else. It appeared at two places at the same time the asian continent apart not because it was religious but because it was exploiting an human neurophysiological reality that every culture discovers one way or the other.

Yes, many instructors will toss in way too much ‘woo woo’ pseudo eastern philosophy silliness and that is a problem, but mediation the practice works without any of it.

I highly recommend the book and the practice and actively cut out any ‘woo woo’ an instructor tries to toss your way.

mai1dude39

If you enjoy getting into a silly pose in front of other people, go for it.

acontraryview

“and an outspoken proponent of homosexual marriage”

And the award for mentioning something that is completely unrelated to the story goes to………

April J

Oh, trust me, the writers for this site have closets full of those awards! haha

acontraryview

it is one of their strong suits.

Oshtur

This stuff is for vegans and other cuckoos.

Herb Planter

It’s only gonna get worse with this type of stuff, so be ready and call em on it.

Grace Kim Kwon

Eastern religions are not sexually chaotic immoral like the Western hedonism, but this is how they keep slaves( Dalits) forever. Man gains no freedom apart from the Holy Bible. Secular West keeps Eastern religions’ injustices and also its own original nudism and sexual depravity – a hopelessly toxic condition. The West has no functioning conscience apart from Christianity. People need Christianity for the truth, salvation, morality, human rights, and freedom.

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